We are continuing in our commitment to provide regular updates on changes to or additions of metrics across Facebook ads and Pages. Today, we are sharing two new metrics updates: removal of unintentional clicks on ads in the Audience Network and new ad impression reporting.
Removing unintentional clicks from Audience Network
When browsing across the web or in an app, ads may pop up in places that cause people to accidentally click on them. These interactions are often quick, as the person immediately closes out of the landing page to return to their original destination.
These ad experiences can be profitable in the short term for publishers, but they fail to deliver good experiences for businesses or people. For advertisers, these kinds of unintentional clicks can dilute the value of their campaigns.
To understand if a click is intentional, one of the metrics we look at in our delivery models and quality detection systems is “drop off rates”—the time a user spends on the landing page of an ad. We found that people who click on an Audience Network ad and spend less than 2 seconds on a destination page almost always clicked accidentally. Moving forward, we will no longer count clicks categorized as unintentional in advertiser’s campaigns.
We’re also clarifying our policies around ad placements that better service people and businesses. You can learn more about those changes here.
Moving forward, we will begin experimenting with more ways to reduce the number of unintentional clicks by looking further into additional bounce rate metrics, and trying to prevent users from accidentally clicking in the first place.
Above is an example of an ad placement that may lead to an unintentional click
Better view of total campaign impressions
Advertisers tell us they want more simple insights into how their ads are delivered. To give businesses a better view of the total impressions ads receive, we are providing two new metrics to help offer more clarity on the number of ads shown to people.
Gross impressions capture all impressions, billable and non-billable. Impressions aren’t billed if they were delivered after an advertiser’s budget was spent, are served to the same person within a short time, or are due to detectable fraud. Gross impressions gives marketers the opportunity to quantify non-billable impressions.
Auto-refresh impressions provide a granular look at impressions generated from right-hand side placements. Ads placed on the right-hand side of the desktop News Feed are automatically refreshed with a new set of ads after a period of time. Auto-refresh impressions will show you how many impressions on your right-hand side ad are a result of a browser refresh.
These updates offer more transparency into ad delivery and help ensure that you pay for valuable impressions. As always, keep checking back for further metrics updates in the coming months.